Unlike 08 numbers, 03 numbers cost the same to call as geographic landline numbers (starting 01 and 02), even from a mobile phone. They are also included as part of inclusive call minutes and discount schemes from all major mobile phone and landline operators.

Summify: Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader Summaries Made Easy

This week I’m taking a break from the Video and Website Optimisation blog posts as I wanted to highlight a web service I’ve been using lately to help aggregate the overflowing amount of blog posts and links from people I follow on Twitter and from my Google Reader account. It’s called Summify and it does exactly what it says on the tin, summarise and deliver the most popular and relevant stories to your email inbox, twitter feed or via the web interface and new iPhone App.

If you’re like me and have more than 100 feeds in your Google Reader or follow hundreds of people on Twitter then keeping up with the latest news can take half a day and much time would be wasted scan reading the news as it comes in. Summify generates an aggregated news feed to the top shared and most viewed news stories at intervals you set. You current have the option to get a summary:

4 times a day (every 6 hours)

3 times a day (every 8 hours)

Twice a day (every 12 hours)

Daily

Every 2 days

Every 3 days

You are also able to set the time that the summary is generated and the number of top stories in each summary which currently can be no more than 10.

The Summify interface is clean, tidy and eye catching with a bulleted list of top stories with a snippet of the story and the source domain. Below each story are thumbnail images of some of the people sharing the story and the number of tweets, Facebook likes, shares and comments. I find the summaries easy to scan through and don’t really pay attention to amount of times it’s been shared, etc.

Once you click on a story you view the original page with the Summify Social bar at the top. It provides quick links to coping the URL of the article and sharing it on Twitter, Facebook, Google and via Email. In future I would like to see the option to share to more services like delicious and other bookmarking services. If you click on the thumbnail images in the social bar you can see the actual tweets where people have shared the story, which could be useful to spark a reply to one of the people you follow on Twitter.

So after a few weeks of using the email delivery option of Summify I feel that it does quite a good job of choosing important stories, but I feel I’m still missing out on many others. Perhaps this could be fixed by allowing more than 10 stories in each summary, but I’d imagine this would require more investment in the service as would increase the server load considerably. Summify are currently hiring and rolling out great updates including the recent new iPhone app and the ability to get an RSS feed of your summary. Cristian Strat and Mircea Paşoi have created something extremely useful (for me at least) and I urge you all to try it out!

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Dean Marsden will be keeping you up to speed with video marketing and conversion rate optimisation. Dean excels at delivering video marketing solutions for clients and specialises in converting website visitors into customers.

3 Comments

Thanks for an awesome overview Dean! If you find yourself looking for additional stories, the best way is to do this at the moment is to increase the frequency of your Summaries.

Some cool updates are coming up later this week. Starting off with the 1.1 release of the iPhone app, featuring instapaper integration and fixes for 3G and iPod Touch users. As for the rest, you’ll just have to wait and see

What do you think?

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